The Birth of "China''s National Economy" : Governmentality of Economy, Production of Knowledge and Imagination of Public (1906-1992)

• Main Authors: I-Cheng Lin, 林易澄
• Other Authors: Chin-shing Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/qdycf7

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 歷史學研究所 === 106 === What does it mean to produce ‘a knowledge that is capable of representing China''s economy as a whole’? This type of knowledge has not appeared before, but became focus of attentions in the 20th century. Taking this as a starting point, this dissertation explores an important change of the governmentality in modern China: the goverment tried to regulate private economic activities directly. In this dissertation, I would like to discuss the process of this change and its historical meaning, based on the production of the economic knowledge at that time, and the confusions, thoughts and prospects left by the people working in the forefront. As the historical documents indicate, ‘China''s national economy’ was not an already existing entity, but a sphere constructed by the interactions between the government and private economic activities since the last years of the Qing Dynasty. Surrounding this sphere, a series of knowledge productions, institutional arrangements, and political engineerings with new imaginations of state emerged together. In the late imperial China, the government did not regulate private economic activities directly. The bridges between the two sides were various informal institutions and middlemen, such as local gentries, petty officials, monopoly merchants, and brokers of marketplace. This system enabled the government to rule a large empire with a small bureaucracy. Facing the social changes brought by commercial developments since the 16th century, this system kept the order of society by implementing according to local conditions. In the 19th century, the internal and external crises increased the amount of informal institutions as well as the financial demands. From the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, the Chinese government and the private economic activities were getting closer and closer. As the result, the gray area of this system of governance also expanded and went out of control. The impact of the world system of trade also aggravated the deterioration of this system of governance. At the intersection of these two changes, a new governmentality emerged. Since then, the fiscal principle had changed from arranging the expenditure according to the income, to arranging the income according to the expenditure. The aim of politics had changed from doing nothing but removing drawbacks, to improving developments. And from indirect governance, to a direct and full scale one. This process released tremendous energy and caused tremendous chaos, engulfing all the people into this whirlpool Henceforward, economic activities in China began to be considered as a whole. Knowledge, institutional arrangements and power relations about the economic activities had developed gradually in order to grasp this sphere full of energy and chaos. There were two opposite but dependent tendencies in this process. The first one made a strong top-down mechanism of the administrative control, while the second one regulated the economic activities by the rules of the economic sphere through knowledge surveys. This sphere attracts people of all positions. Some sought to seize and interpret the facts, some sought their own interests, and some sought the blueprint for a public sphere. In the period of the Republic of China, the government lacked strong administrative capacity and private economic activities lacked tight organization. These two situations made financial officials and social scientists confused. "There is nothing called economy in China as its definition in the West." They found out what they studied from the West were not useful in China. This confusion, however, urged them to go beyond the border of the economic knowledge originated from the West and to think about the true nature of ‘China''s national economy.’ Since the beginning of the financial liquidation in the late Qing Dynasty, people in the forefront found out the disorder of the private economic organizations and the need for government intervention, but also became concerned of the failure of the arbitrariness of the government. "Which type of governance is effective?" Between the dangers of dictatorship and disorder, they asked this question. They tried to produce a set of knowledge based on the economic activities, in order to draw the line between intervention and non-intervention. They tried to establish an institutional arrangement to include both government and people, drawing them to support and constrain each other at the same time. The effort to produce knowledge for effectively governing this unconstructed political-economic sphere reached its peak between the late 1920s and 1940s. In the crisis of the Great Depression and the ensuing wars, people worked hard under the goal of rationalizing the organizations of China''s national economy. From the liberalism to the Marxism, from the fieldwork to the aggregate analysis, economic theories and knowledge tools from the historical experiences in Western Europe were transformed in order to recognize and respond to the reality of China. Through these works, they created things based on the economic logic, and at the same time discovered the things that didn’t fit into the theories. They had gradually realized the distance between the economic knowledge and the reality, thus found out the political nature of the social science. Due to the civil war and the inflation, the government and the private economic activities were growing closer than before at the end of the 1940s. Following the state-building process, the top-down administrative control had been strengthened. However, contrary to its intention, this development worsened the economic disorder. Under this situation, many Chinese intellectuals were attracted by the idea of radicalization, but some chose the other direction, hoping to answer the difficulty of the reality with a holistic knowledge. The dilemma between dictatorship and disorder was worsening day by day. Facing this sphere harassed by chaos of politics, economy and ethics, the intellectuals proposed a new blueprint of humanities and social sciences, in which they started from public discussion of the macro-economic knowledge, then go on to ask "what is a reasonable intervention?" then reflected the results of the discussions on "what is a good state?" Some scholars went even further to discuss the governmentality of economy beyond the economic sphere. By retrospecting the system of governance of the imperial China, they took a holistic view to find the organic links in hope of reconstructing the out-of-order China. Inspecting China''s economic modernization in a historical view, they realized that these organizations and institutions that made up the economic sphere were not merely the products of economic sphere itself, but also the results of the social and cultural practices. They noticed that the coordination of numerous middlemen in the past could not be superseded by the administration of the government itself, nor could the operation of the market alone. Effective economic reconstruction and governance, therefore, require the production of a public knowledge, in which all the economic actors participate. That is, as the object of this sphere, they should also become the subject of it. After 1949, this sphere was answered by the single voice of Chinese Communist Party-state. The production of the holistic knowledge and the construction of its public imagination were abruptly halted. However, this is not just a story of a transitional period. With the most powerful administrative machine in the history of modern China, the authorities found out that there are always unseen economic elements that can not be regulated under planned economy. The distance between the government planning and the operation of the reality cannot be resolved by revolution. The result was quite different than what Marxist economics thought. When the production of economic knowledge was completely under the control of the government and the public discussion disappeared, the government found that itself had to face the problems of human relations outside of the economic factors. When calculating the inherent rationality of a socialist economy, the government had to ask itself "what is a state?" and "what is economy?" after all. Eventually, these questions were replied with the establishment of the market economy in 1980s. Today, both government capabilities and economic organizations are stronger in China, and it seems as though ‘China''s national economy’ has become an entity. However, things which could not be included in the knowledge produced by the state-building and economic formation have not disappear. They are still hovering in the darkness, asking and waiting for answers. The birth of ‘China''s national economy’ has not yet been completed, and the echoes of the production of economic knowledge and imagination of public discussion in 1940s still linger in our ears.